How Stablecoins Scaled Cross-Border Payments to $80B w/ Daniel Vogel (Bitso)

The future is a future where more and more financial services are going to be served on chain and where the tokenization of assets is just something that will continue to grow. We believe that people will still want to get things priced in their local currencies, so we want to make sure there are basic building blocks for the DeFi onchain world that are in tune with consumer expectations, at least in the geographies where we work. An example of this is we have companies in Mexico that offer credit. They offer credit in Mexican pesos, people earn in Mexican pesos, and they want to repay their loans in Mexican pesos. So we would expect at some point for more people to want to get onchain loans, but to want those onchain loans in MXN. For that, you need an MXN stablecoin.

Very good. Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me, and excited to tell you a little bit about what we are doing.

I'm originally from Mexico. I was living in San Francisco, and a friend of mine told me about Bitcoin. This must have been about 2010. I went back home and read up on Bitcoin, and I was fascinated. What is money? Who gets to decide how much is printed? I used to love working late at night, and the cleaning staff at the company where I was working in San Francisco was also from Mexico. We would talk about whatever, whether it was the World Cup or Mexican elections. His name is Julio. One day, Julio asked me for money. He said, 'Hey man, would you spot me 300 bucks and I'll pay you at the end of the week?' I said, 'Sure, Julio, but I've known you for years and you've never asked me for money. Is everything okay?' He said, 'Look, I need to send money back home and there's a very big fixed cost. My daughter needs some school utensils urgently. If I send what I have, a big portion will be eaten by the fixed fee. But if you lend me the money, I'll get paid in a few days and pay you back.' Even though I'd been in the US for maybe seven years, I never really understood the pains of remittances and how expensive they were. I found it fascinating that you could press a button and FaceTime anyone at no cost, but moving money across borders was very expensive. My two co-founders of Bitso, Ben and Pablo, were also individuals not living in their home country. The three of us were fascinated by Bitcoin as a mechanism to move money between borders. A big part of starting Bitso was to move money across borders. We needed to replace Swift and correspondent banking and all that old infrastructure. We thought Bitcoin was the answer. Before starting the company, I tried to build a different company that would send remittances from the US to Mexico via Bitcoin, but there was no way to make those bitcoins liquid in Mexico for pesos. People would receive them and ask, 'How do I buy medicine or pay for utilities with this?' That's what made Bitso as an exchange the obvious first product. We needed a mechanism to make Bitcoin liquid with Mexican pesos. We were one of the first to really start moving money between the US and Mexico at scale using Bitcoin. Our second product was a broker for customers who wanted to invest in crypto but found the order book too complex. We built an easier, all-mobile experience where you could buy and sell any cryptocurrency. That's still our largest product from a revenue perspective. But our ambition was always to build cross-border stuff. We kept trying many different things, and it wasn't until stablecoins reached a critical mass that we could really grow the infrastructure to finally do that original vision of replacing correspondent banking and cross-border money movement rails. We started moving money between countries using stablecoins like USDC and USDT. That has grown. We do about 10% of the remittances between the US and Mexico. About $60 billion flows from the US to Mexico every year, and we do about 10% of that. Our TPV on cross-border payments is close to $8 billion a year, larger than the remittance corridor. Now we power other companies making payments and individuals making cross-border payments. We handle treasuries for corporates. Bitso has become the largest digital asset infrastructure provider in LATAM. We allow companies to build on top of us via APIs, and we also have end customers. We believe money should be digital, programmable, and live on a blockchain. We want to connect the banking rails of Latin America with the global crypto rails to facilitate cross-border transactions between individuals, businesses, and across countries. We still have a large brokerage business where stablecoins are important because many customers want to buy dollars. Access to dollars in LATAM is a big business, but that's more of an investment or savings app. What we've been building on the B2B side is infrastructure to do payments at scale, from liquidity to payout and pay-in.

It's funny to hear you say we were trying all this stuff, because we really were. We always found a few customers who were intrigued. There are people around the world who have been paying attention for a long time and were willing to be part of that journey, from remittance companies to very traditional companies that have been customers for almost a decade. But a lot of other stuff wasn't there: the liquidity, the technology, even the regulatory stuff. You could argue that part of that is still not there today to fully unlock the potential. We still feel there's a little more regulatory clarity needed. Some lessons along the way: you can have a lot of fun, but if this had been our sole business, we would have been out of business for a long time. We were very lucky that crypto as an asset class grew and that we had the investment side on the retail product. That broker funded a lot of the R&D and patience we've had on the cross-border side. The second thing is that we were a company in Mexico looking up to US companies. Another lesson is that it doesn't matter who you are or where you are; you can still innovate and be pioneers. There were times we thought maybe we should just copy the playbook of successful players. That has worked for many companies globally, like Uber competitors that got bought by Uber. The largest tech company in LATAM, Mercado Libre, was basically a copy of eBay that became a large competitor to Amazon. You can build very successful businesses that way. But we're proud that we innovated a lot in the cross-border space through sheer will of trying and retrying. We would never have been able to do that without something paying the bills and bringing in money. The next thing is that when innovating in financial services, you need to get comfortable innovating in slightly gray zones. At Bitso, we had clear things we never wanted to do, like dealing with nefarious actors. But even with legitimate clients, you can't fully build a fully regulated solution from the get-go because regulators don't have an incentive to regulate something that might become important. They play catch-up. Financial services is so regulated that it's tricky. You need to create space where you have enough compliance, follow the spirit of the law with conviction, so if someone asks questions, you have good answers, but you can actually innovate. That's been a lot of fun, very stressful at times, but always interesting. How do you negotiate with regulators? How do you position yourself? That's still true today. The last lesson is that the team is really important. A lot of the vision came from me, Ben, and Pablo as founders, but a lot of the awesome stuff we've developed came from the team. People who buy into your vision and get excited about what you're doing can really innovate. I'm very grateful for the people who've been part of the Bitso journey. In terms of the $8 billion TPV, our largest operation continues to be Mexico. The majority of that volume is Mexico, followed by Brazil, then Colombia, then Argentina. From a B2B perspective, our retail business is slightly different: Mexico is biggest, but Argentina is number two. The majority of the flow today is PSPs. These are companies that sell solutions to merchants and customers to process payments, and they help these companies move money in or out of a country. These companies are poorly served by the traditional world. They can become really competitive if they can figure out mechanisms to hand the money they collect to their merchants quicker. Before, they had to wait for money to accumulate, do FX conversion, wait days for it to clear through the traditional banking system, then deliver it. Now, every payment gets converted into USDC or USDT and shipped directly to the merchant, sometimes with the PSP's commission. That's really starting to change PSPs, and that business has grown significantly for us. Remittances have been a mixed story; we grow at times and shrink. Remittances are a competitive game where margins on FX really matter. The flow we have is interesting because remittance companies have high working capital costs. They need to prefund accounts. They enter partnerships with payout companies in Mexico, but those companies charge them as long as they have money sitting in the account. If an international transfer takes one business day, you need to send money on Thursday to front operations for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, requiring three full working days of working capital. Big holidays happen on weekends, so these companies struggle with the high cost of working capital. Our solution is 24/7. They love it for nights and weekends because they can lower the amount kept at payout partners and top them up whenever needed. The solution is simple: they have dollars in a US bank account, providers turn them into stablecoins, send them to Bitso, Bitso gives good pricing on liquidity, turns them into MXN, and we send that to the end customer's bank account or a payout partner. To answer your question, from the $8 billion I quoted, probably 75% is Mexico. Out of that 75%, about 10% is remittance business, and the rest is a combination of PSPs and corporates moving money between countries.

Yeah, and they've been growing significantly over the last year. The stablecoin story has been powerful in 2025. We see small, medium, and large enterprises all curious, with different levels of engagement. The large payment networks like Visa and Mastercard are thinking hard about how to make stablecoins an opportunity for their business. There's still a lot to be done. One of the biggest issues we still see is tax uncertainty, like how the Mexican tax code treats a stablecoin. As those things get cleared up, the solution is so much better and faster that more and more people will continue to onboard. Over the next 10 years, we're going to forget about correspondent banking.

When we look at USD stablecoins, we see them fulfilling important customer needs. People in Latin America, depending on where they are, may find it easier or harder to get a US dollar bank account. Stablecoins make it very easy. As long as you have access to a place like Bitso, you can easily onboard into stablecoins. That's exciting. The second thing is that stablecoins are a really important building block of the DeFi world. Everything related to onchain exchanges, collateralized loans, all that stuff happening onchain, USD stablecoins are a crucial building block. The third thing is what I was just talking about: cross-border settlement flows, whether settling a credit card with Visa or a remittance with Bitso using a USD stablecoin. As we think about the future, we don't think there will be a big appetite for Americans to hold MXN the same way Mexicans hold USD. Mexicans have been holding USD forever; very few Americans hold MXN. So that use case doesn't really apply for MXNB or BRL1. However, the other two are very interesting. We are firm believers in the onchain economy. The future is one where more financial services will be served on chain, and tokenization of assets will continue to grow. People will still want things priced in their local currencies, so we want to ensure there are basic building blocks for the DeFi onchain world that align with consumer expectations in the geographies where we work. For example, companies in Mexico offer credit in Mexican pesos. People earn in Mexican pesos and want to repay loans in Mexican pesos. We expect at some point for more people to want onchain loans denominated in MXN. For that, you need an MXN stablecoin. As we think about cross-border payments, we believe more liquidity will move onchain because there are real benefits to having pricing, FX, and settlement on chain. For the audience, think of it like this: you used to have local magazines covering events. Then the internet came, creating global venues for information. It changed media forever. When I was a kid, the media I had access to was whatever Mexican media decided to show me. With the internet, I could access information from all over the world. My favorite band is Radiohead, and there was never anything in Mexican media about them. The internet allowed me to connect with like-minded individuals globally. The same thing will happen with onchain stuff. Onchain is another concept similar to the internet. It will bring financial services and products to everyone. You'll be able to access a loan on chain that's more competitive than what your local bank offers. When it comes to FX, liquidity will be liquidity. You'll want more liquidity in pools that are more visible, transparent, and discoverable, and that needs to be on an onchain venue. MXNB and BRL1 become really important building blocks. There's already a really interesting amount of activity for MXNB on chain and for BRL1 as well, particularly on...

Avalanche. And then the last thing is, when I moved to Mexico, I moved back to Mexico. So I'm from Mexico, but then I spent 10 years in the US and then I moved back to Mexico. And when I moved back, there was this new system, this new payment system called SPEI, which is the system that connects banks and financial institutions in the country. And I thought it was kind of cool, like, oh, you enter this number and you make a payment. And then I was like, when we were starting Bitso, we're like, oh, we should become a participant of SPEI. And that journey took us like seven years to basically do it. And the amount of innovation that's happening on SPEI is minimal because it's such an important part of infrastructure, run by the central bank, very regulated, very difficult to be a participant, very expensive. We were actually talking to a bank recently who's like, I don't want to be a participant of SPEI anymore, I'm going to offload that to a third party. But the point that I'm trying to make there is that I feel like it's very difficult to innovate even in local payment systems, payment rails. And I want to believe that there's going to be a really interesting set of innovation that'll happen with local stablecoins when it relates to local payments. And the reason why I feel that is because right now you have an explosion of fintech in Mexico, but they all have to have this really difficult moment connecting to the SPEI system through third parties and whatnot. And I feel like if there was an easy tech-enabled solution on chain that we're trying to obviously build with MXNB, we would just basically start seeing a lot of innovation there where people are going to start thinking, I no longer need to go through this super hard and difficult system to get onboarded, but I can basically innovate on top of a stablecoin. And I think we're going to see cool stuff for local payments as well with new experiences that today cannot get built on top of SPEI but could get built on top of these local stables. And so that's kind of our vision. We believe that payments will just need, like any other asset, local currencies will need to be tokenized. That will make them play a very important role in the DeFi world, and we believe that new use cases will emerge as more and more companies start playing with the idea of, oh, maybe I can just use a stablecoin as opposed to these archaic really complex systems.

Yeah, you hit it spot on, Chuck, because it's kind of like the end state is so obvious, but I have no idea how the hell we're going to get there. And so we're just trying all these things. Actually, I just had a meeting with my whole management team and we were literally talking strategy, and we were talking about how we have these products that we know there's demand for today, and then we have these ideas that we know that's how the future is going to work, and how do you basically run a company that allows you to fund these longer initiatives? Because when you fund them and they're successful, even if it takes half a decade or a decade, it's very rewarding. You were able to see the future and not only see the future, but you were able to shape it. People have used the story of the cross-border payments that Bitso has done for a really long time. Some of the litigation that's happening in the US actually quotes it as a real positive side of crypto, this cross-border stuff that we were doing. But I guess the way that I think about it is you need to be very stubborn with the vision but very flexible on the details. I'm pretty sure someone else that's smarter than I am said that already, so I'm just copying. I forgot who it was, but it's something that I really take to heart at Bitso because, as I mentioned before, some of the real breakthroughs happened when the team was just innovating by themselves, and I'm kind of hoping that the same thing happens here where some of the things that are the big blockers today—regulatory, liquidity, even just technically—now we live in this world where we've created hundreds of chains and a bunch of layer twos, and as opposed to liquidity getting liquidity, we're fragmenting liquidity, and that has its own set of issues. So as an industry, we're also going through the Cambrian explosion of ideas, but a lot of them just need to die. Survival of the fittest, many of them cannot survive. But it's confusing building today in crypto because there's so many, and you get approached by all these players like, 'Oh, release MXNB on my chain and I'll give you X or Y,' and so you do some of these things, but then they don't really end up where you want them. But I guess if I had to summarize, I think the three things are regulatory, where I think the US is leading the way with GENIUS and clarity, etc. But when it comes to cross-border flows, you would also depend on the other countries. Mexico I think did a very good job in 2018, and now it's been really lagging behind. The second place I think is liquidity, and liquidity is always this chicken and egg problem because we can inject a bunch of MXN liquidity, but if no one is using it, it just becomes very expensive to have that liquidity sitting there. So you don't necessarily want that, but then the opposite is true: people go in and say, 'Oh, there's no liquidity in this market, so I don't want to.' So you need to figure out these mechanisms to get that flywheel started. On that front, we're trying a bunch of stuff and partnering with a lot of really interesting companies and protocols to get MXNB to be more widely used and have more liquidity. And then the last thing I would say is the technology itself. I think blockchain technology has gotten significantly better. Trying to do this with Bitcoin was very difficult, slow, volatile, etc. We did this with Ethereum for a long time, and then transaction costs got really high, but now they're kind of back, and now you have the scalability of these layer twos, but then there are questions around privacy. But I feel like all of these things are going to get sorted out. I was looking at a chart that someone sent me that was showing the daily transactions per second in the Ethereum ecosystem. It's fascinating. Ethereum is doing close to 400 transactions per second. Not long ago, we were thinking it was impossible to think that this thing was going to even scale beyond seven or maybe 10 transactions per second. Now we're doing 40 times that of actual volume. That's not the limit of the network; it's just what's already happening. I always find the technical aspects of crypto so interesting because we move very quickly, but there's still a lot of work to be done.